Thursday, January 10, 2013

“We tried to incorporate and promote the clients memories, desires, experiences, and fictions in the design process,” explain the architects at Spanish studio elii.

My earliest memories--and yours, I’d wager--are of spaces: kitchen windows, dining-room tables, and snowy backyards. Place and memory are closely tied in our densely packed brains, hence all of the recent fraternizing between neuroscientists and architects.

So space affects memory. But could memory also affect space? That was the question for elii, a Spanish architecture office that accepted an unusual commission for a home several years ago. Their client requested that the architects design her new home--on the outskirts of Madrid--based on happy memories.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

How does a ruin — be it the remains of an industrial factory or the relic of an ancient civilization — fit into the landscape of a city? Beyond its warped mass of broken materiality, a ruin is also a disordering of time. It maligns time, dissolving boundaries between past and present. The question is not where the ruin is located, but when? Not in the present, but neither in the past. Time out of joint, to invoke the spectre of Hamlet.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

…re-curating the already well curated…from The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan @ The Daily Beast. I've always liked both the descriptive tag line, "biased and balanced," and the Orwell quote on the masthead, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Indeed it does. What are your candidates for best small towns on the big screen? The Milagro Beanfield War ~ for a regional spin? Others?

Good depictions of small-town life are underrepresented in the arts, according to Terry Teachout:

"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography," said Oscar Wilde. I've noticed something similar when it comes to fictional treatments of small-town life in America, most of which are the work of bright, embittered émigrés who couldn't wait to grow up, move to the big city, and write novels, most of them
bad, about how much they hated their childhoods. ...

For the most part, you have to look to films, not novels, to get a clear sense of small-town life, and it's surprising--or maybe not--how few of the ostensibly serious ones hit the mark at all squarely. By far the most convincing cinematic portrayal of a small town that I know is Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, a modest little masterpiece that gets absolutely everything right. Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show comes close, but it's too harsh to be entirely persuasive, at least to me.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

…all the places along the way…concisely if somewhat short on particulars…

"Martin Elmer's "Laconic History of the World" is a typographic map of the world that reduces each country to a single word. It was produced, Martin says, "by running all the various countries' 'History of _____' Wikipedia article through a word cloud, then writing out the most common word to fit into the country's boundary. The result is thousands of years of human history oversimplified into 100-some words." Martin has also created a graphic reader's companion that explains the results."